Pastamaker mixes it up

How does an ambitious young man combine a culinary degree with his love of vintage motorcycles and scooters?

He makes pasta, of course, and peddles it around Charleston in a funky, three-wheeled delivery scooter, a 1967 Italian Vespa APE. It looks like a big box perched on an oversized tricycle, but it has a gasoline motor that buzzes like a bee and gets a sweet 80 mpg. It steers with a handlebar rather than a wheel.

"It works perfect," says Brian Bertolini, "except for going over the bridge. That's scary."

Bertolini is a hands-on guy, and that serves him well in his pasta business, named Rio Bertolini's. Rio is his middle name and the first name of his great-grandfather, who came over from Sicily.

Bertolini has made a few crossings himself in his 28 years.

Today, five years after he started out making pastas in his apartment, he's putting a stamp on the local culinary scene. More than 60 restaurants in the area buy his fresh ravioli, cut pastas and gnocchi. Retail outlets are few but expanding. He's also a regular at the Charleston and Mount Pleasant farmers markets, and soon will be at Freshfields Village near Kiawah Island.

He's created some 250 types of ravioli and other pastas in that time. They are filled or flavored with vegetables — locally grown as much as possible — and Italian cheeses. Popular ravioli include porcini mushroom, lobster and black truffle, goat cheese and herbs. Cut pastas bear the hues of spinach, saffron, beets, black pepper or whatever goes into the dough. His gnocchi are made with cheese, not potatoes.

Bertolini got another feather in his cap last weekend after receiving a surprise phone call Saturday. Actor Kevin Costner, who is filming a movie here, asked Bertolini to make the food for an Oscar night party he was hosting Sunday. Bertolini and friends jumped at the chance.

Bertolini, who says he's never had a business plan, moved from Boston to Charleston in 2001 after visiting friends here. He had graduated from the Culinary Institute of America two years earlier and was working as a chef. When he got to Charleston, he got a job as a line cook for Charleston Grill, a stint that lasted a year.

Meanwhile, succumbing to his parents' wishes, he enrolled in the College of Charleston. "My parents were pushing me to go back to school and get a bachelor's degree," says Bertolini, whose major was international business. Bertolini made it to his senior year before the lure of entrepreneurship became irresistible.

"I started this in my apartment. It took me six months to make my first sale," Bertolini says.

He used a local bakery's mixer to make his dough, and then shaped the ravioli all by hand at home. He was so broke he used wine glasses to form them and make a good seal. Still, he was determined.

"After working in the restaurant industry and talking to a lot of chefs, I realized that kitchens were so small here that everyone was buying pasta from sales reps. ... I knew I could do it better."

But his initial attempts weren't very successful. "I was so young no one took me seriously. I was bringing it to them in Ziploc bags between work and school."

In retrospect, he also thinks those first ravioli were a little far out. "They were more off the wall back then," he says, filled with veal sweetbreads, duck confit, braised short ribs, foie gras. "That might have been half the problem — things that were very expensive and nobody was buying them."

Bertolini says he "hit the wall," realizing he was going nowhere. He took a new tack.

He found out what restaurants were paying for ravioli from vendors. He read restaurant menus, then went home and made those same ravioli in a quantity. "I would give them (chefs) the whole case for free so they would try it," he says. If the restaurant liked them, he would undercut the going rate.

Before long, he was in business.

"It just kind of grew and grew real quick. Once I started selling, it got to the point where I was working morning to night and skipping school." So he dropped out.

As orders increased, he needed more space and storage. "The only thing I was looking for was a big walk-in freezer," he says. He finally found it and a kitchen at the then-closed Stono Market on Johns Island.

Bertolini stayed there two or three years. In 2006, he started leasing a building from Limehouse Produce on Wappoo Road west of the Ashley. It was a turning point.

"That was what really made us huge," he says. "Nobody knew we existed except the restaurants we went to. All of a sudden there was traffic every day."

Jack and Andrea Limehouse, his landlords, also befriended Bertolini, who had no money when he moved there. They put in a freezer, left him $30,000 worth of equipment and gave him good deals on produce.

"They are like my parents," he says. "They're amazing people. They never asked for anything."

The self-described "eBay nut" also made a unexpected connection online. On a Web site devoted to old motorcycles, he communicated with an Ohio man. The man asked Bertolini what he did for a living. "I make pasta," Bertolini said. "I make pasta, too," the man replied.

Bertolini ended up going to Cleveland and buying from him 40-year-old machines to make Italian dough and pasta. His parents loaned him $15,000.

But the equipment does things in minutes that used to take hours even though they require a lot of mechanical coddling. They enable Bertolini and his righthand man, Cliff Newland, to turn out 320 pounds of ravioli and 150 pounds of cut pasta daily. The two also make about 600 pounds of gnocchi each week.

"If I couldn't work on stuff, we would be out of business. We work on them (the machines) every day."

Bertolini feared that going from handmade to machine-made might hurt the pastas' appeal, even though his ingredients — fresh, seasonal produce, high-quality cheeses and flour — remained the same. But, he says, "People liked it better because it was more consistent and held up better."

Even though business is going well, Bertolini still is winging it and making pasta day by day. He allows that the next step might be new equipment. "Now, they make things that are less dangerous," he quips.

He adds, "I don't have a desire to be a big company. I'd rather keep it small and under control. We don't want to stretch ourselves too thin."

Teresa Taylor is the food editor. Reach her at food@postandcourier.com or 937-4886.